Free Republic

Remember, the main limit right now on the gas supply is refining capicity, not oil cost. The oil companies would love to be able to build more refineries, but the enviros throw a hissy fit every time they try to do so. In the example you gave, I would imagine the Southeast has a lot more refining capacity (especially in Texas & Louisiana) than the Northwest, explaining the price difference. Also note, since oil is a commodity, it doesn't matter if it comes from Alaska, or OPEC, or the Moon. The price is going to be the same everywhere, excluding a bit for transportation cost.

Yep, Mao screwed up the Chinese demographics quite well, causing a massive population boom in an already crowded country, before it was rich enough, thus making these dracion one childs laws seem neccessarry.

By mid century or so, they are going be facing old-population problem as bad as Japan's or Europe's is going to be in a decade or so. Fortuantly for us here in these United States, our demographic trends are probably the best of any major nation - our population is aging relatively slowly, and by most estimates, the US will actually have a younger median age than the PRC by 2025.

Given that most illegal immigrants in Europe tend to be Muslim (and they get the more wacko ones than we get; at least all the Muslims here in the US have to be able to figure out the airline system), I think I would go with the drug dealer.

Plans for a 'thin constellation of three to six spacecraft' in orbit, which would target enemy missiles as they took off or landed, are planned, according to Hitchens. The document, said Hitchens, signals that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which outlaws the use of weapons in orbit, will be ignored.

Hitchens is an idiot that should actually read the 1967 Outer Space Treaty - it bans "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in space, not all weapons. The weapons we intend to place in space will be perfectly legal, just like that 23mm anti-aircraft gun the Soviets bolted onto one of their Salyut craft back in the 1970's.

And what exactly is wrong with tentacle monsters having sex on the mind? Maybe if those schoolgirls didn't wear such cute outfits, there wouldn't be such a problem.

They could, but the parents would know the device was turned off, and the kid does have to come home sometime.

The only way Putin could do a Tienamen would be to physically invade Ukraine. And that could potentially start WWIII. Putin knows Russia isn't strong enough yet to consider this.

Well, remember that compliance with current income taxes cost a lot of money - something like $200-$400 billion dollars is wasted to comply with the tax code every year. Since a NRST would be much simpler to comply with (there are a lot fewer retailers than income earners and simply adding 30% to a bill is much easier to calculate than the byzantine tax code now) the hidden cost of tax compliance would largely be eliminated.

Since this would reduce the cost to every company out there, competition would force them to drop their own prices in return. The pre-tax price drop would blunt the impact the sales tax has on everyone.

Secondly, the Fair Tax NRST plan also issues every SS card holder (from a bum on the street to Bill Gates) a prebate - equal to poverty level tax spending every month. Thus, if the tax rate was 30%, a person spending poverty level money wouldn't be paying any taxes; a person spending twice of the poverty level would effectively be paying only 15%, a person spending trice would effectively be paying 20% taxes, and so on. Unlike most sales taxes, the Fair Tax plan is not regressive.

Finally, ending the complex tax we have now will free up 2%-4% of the GDP currently wasted on tax compliance, stimulating more economic growth. Also, since the Fair Tax plan ends corporate taxes, that makes the US a lot more attractive to foreign business, who will set up shop here, adding more money to the economy.

Yeah, but the 15% minimum (most European countries are even higher) VAT the EU enforces on its members would take off a lot of the savings.

You should definatly see The Incredibles - to put it simply, it is an incredible movie. ;) And my favorite line in that movie strikes right at the heart of the PC left - "If everyone is special, then nobody really is."

I have personally pulled off the gallon of milk in an hour trick before, & I didn't throw up. I didn't feel well for a while afterwards, but I kept it down. So did a couple other people. (ah, college fun)

Roughly 12% of the population is hispanic & hispanics make up roughly 12% of the prison population in the US. However, I would be willing to wager that 25% of prisoners being illegals is a pretty close figure for the border states.

Well, it could have been great-grand nephews & neices that requested the move. Or he could have been a widower that joined the clergy after his kids grew up.

I don't see this growth slowing up dramatically.

You might want to check the birth rate figures again. The US is running right at replacement level. Europe(including Russia) is all below replacement level. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, they to are below replacement level. So is Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand - all are below replacement level. In the 1950's India's birthrate was about 6 children per woman; today it is 2.85 children per woman. Pretty much everywhere has seen birth rates decline in the past 50 years.

Good thing I already pre-ordered HL2 with Steam. ;) I think I will go off and play some Counterstrike:Source now.

You get tabbed browsing to work by either middle clicking a link (press down on mouse wheel for middle click) or by right clicking a link, and selecting "Open in New Tab."

Firefox has several benifits over IE; the first is that Firefox is more secure; there are some pages that can install malicisous code (spyware, adware type stuff) merely by visiting said site. Firefox isn't integrated into the core of the OS, so those types of exploits are harder to do. And when problems have been found with Firefox, patches are generally available within a day or so. Microsoft tends to be slower with their IE patches.

The next is tabbed browsing, which allows you to open new windows within the same browser page. This my not sound like much, but it is really a very good way of managing several pages open at once; for example, I can go down the thread list here at FR, and pop open a new tab for each thread that looks interesting, then read them one by one. I can keep things more organised this way - one window with a bunch FR threads open, another window with my webmail, another window containing another message board, and tabs for each thread there. Once you are used to tabs, going back to a tabless browser seems painful.

The next Firefox advantage is the rendering engine. First of all, it is faster than the IE one - pages tend to show up quicker. And, (though is more important to geeks) Firefox follows various web standards, like cascading style sheets & .png graphics, better than IE.

There are lots of very nifty things that can be done with these(things that both look nicer & cut down on bandwidth use), that most websites don't use too much right now, because too many people are using IE, the most primitive of any common browser. On the downside there are a couple of poorly coded sites that won't work with Firefox at all, some of them for no good reason. (Literally - if you tell Firefox to tell webpages that it is IE, the website will normally work just fine.) Of course, since I am a geek, I run into more compatibility problems with IE, then I do with Firefox. The only website that I regually visit that I have had any issue is, ironically, Slashdot.

I think I will wait for the PC port - playing a FPS with a controller is just wrong. A keyboard and mouse are the only proper tools for this type of game. And I hope you guys don't screw up the port first one did - the first game ran like a bloated big on my & all of my friend's computers, despite the fact that each of our machines have ~2-3 times as fast CPU, 8-16 times as much RAM, as good or much better video chips and so on than the Xbox. If Doom 3 & CS:Source can run smooth as silk on my machine, why is Halo so freakin choppy?

Well, they could keep the nukes "secret" like Isreal - don't publicly annouce them, to keep down the diplomatic issues down, but the security just loose enough that the PRC intelligence will know you have them.

To be fair, in the past the French have shown a fair bit of military compentecy. Though as Joan of Arc & Napoleon show, the French can only achieve this when they are not being led by Frenchmen. Let us just hope with this whole European Union thing going on that no German or Finnish general learns to speak Frog. ;) And at least till WWI they had to willingness to stand fast for years of brutal trench warfare, though it does seem they lost the best of that generation; WWII was a disaster for them, though of course they got suprised by new tatics that even the Germans didn't seem to understand that well at first. Of course, if France had the balls to stand up to Germany while they were still weak in the mid '30s, WWII in Europe could have been adverted/altered significantly.

Given that a free American worker is almost always going to be much more productive than a slave, educated to use better equipment, won't have to deal with the standard 3rd world petty corruption (yes this includes China), has lower shipping cost, no tarrifs, and is more motivated to suggest improvements to the process, then yes, non-union American labor can compete with near-slave Chineses labor.

It is not to hard to imagine a situation where $11 an hour work in the US with moderate benifits would more profitable than $1/hr(plus all the baggage foreign labor entails) Chinese labor, but since the unions want $30/hr and cushy benifits, the jobs go to China.